Essays by Hugo Grinebiter

Why Be Sentient?

What is the point of sentience, if all we actually do with it is think up complex justifications for following our animal programming? The definition of intelligent life should be the capability to ask itself whether it might have better things to do than make copies of itself.

It has been said that most ethical and moral discourse is reducible to statements about reproductive strategies; but a specifically human ethics ought to be about something other than following the imperatives that we share with animals, plants and bugs. What is so moral about survival and reproduction? Viruses do that perfectly well without all the yapping about “Values”.